


Orla

by sixbeforelunch



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Fluff Bingo Quarter 2, Gen, Kid Fic, Tom Riker deserves a happy ending too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 14:20:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18662128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixbeforelunch/pseuds/sixbeforelunch
Summary: "Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it." -- Jonathan Swift





	Orla

**Author's Note:**

> For [Fluff Bingo](https://fluffbingo.dreamwidth.org/), prompt: date night.

Deanna paced. Riker watched her progress back and forth across his ready room from his desk. Periodically, she would stop, open her mouth as if to speak, and then resume pacing.

"Deanna, you're making me nervous."

She stopped, sat down. "I had an...interesting communication from a friend back on Betazed this morning."

Riker set aside the PADD he'd been working on and leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. He waited.

"Thomas is on Betazed."

"Thomas who?"

"Thomas Riker, your...I think we decided brother was the least fraught way to describe it."

Will scrubbed at his face. "Right. Him." He frowned and looked up at the ceiling. "I guess it's nice to know he's alive." He didn't exactly like the fact that there was a transporter duplicate of himself running around the galaxy, but that didn't mean he wanted the man dead either. "What's he doing on Betazed?"

Deanna shifted in her chair. "He was with my mother. On a date."

"What‽"

"That's the rumor," Deanna said quickly. "Riv Melar saw them at Beynar's Walk."

Will shook his head and laughed a little. "No. I refuse to believe it. Just because Beynar's Walk is the cliche date night destination for half of the city doesn't mean that everyone who goes there is on a date."

"Riv said they kissed. He thought it was you, and told Selmara, and Selmara told Gensar, and Gensar called me to ask what my husband was doing making out with my mother, and I told her that my husband was with me, four hundred light years from Betazed, and then I thought of Tom, and it...clicked."

Will stared at her. "Are you telling me that my mother-in-law is romantically involved with my...duplicate?"

Deanna shrugged. "I'm saying that's the rumor." She had herself closed off from him, but Will could read her even without their empathic connection, and he could see in the tension in her shoulders and the way her hands were clasped in her lap that there was a part of her that was afraid it was true.

Will tapped his comm badge. "Riker to bridge. I need a priority subspace channel to Betazed right away."

"Aye sir."

"You know you're only allowed to use priority subspace channels for official ship's business."

"This is ship's business," Will countered. "It's important to the ship to have a functional captain, and this captain isn't going to be able to focus on anything else until he finds out if his life has turned into an Andorian dramatic serial."

"You have a point," Deanna said, and pulled her chair around to the other side of the desk so that she could see the computer screen.

Once the priority channel was open, Will quickly typed in the connection code for Lwaxana's house, and they waited.

A click and then, because the universe was not on their side today, Tom Riker appeared, dressed only in a robe and a pair of pajama bottoms, chest bare. "Lwaxana Troi's residence," he said with nonchalance as though he's answered the comm without bothering to check the origin, and then registering who it was, he startled and said, "Oh."

Deanna stared. Will decided to cut to the chase. "Are you having sex with Lwaxana?"

Tom's mouth did a passable impression of a fish on dry land. "Am I what‽"

Lwaxana's voice came from somewhere in another room. "What did he ask?"

"They want to know if we're having sex!" Tom called back.

There was a pause, and then a shriek, and then a howl of laughter, and then Lwaxana cachinnating as only she could. Will looked at Deanna, eyebrows raised. After several seconds of cackling, they heard Lwaxana call. "Tom! T--" She broke off laughing. "Transfer the call, I can't even walk I'm laughing too hard."

The video shifted to Lwaxana's sitting room. Her hair--her natural hair, not any of the wigs she usually favored--was sticking out at all angles, and she was still in her nightgown. "What by all the holy rings made you think--" She broke off giggling. Tom appeared in the frame of the video. "What made you think that Tom and I--" She started laughing again.

Deanna threw up her hands. "Riv Melar saw you together at Beynar's Walk!"

Lwaxana sobered, a little. "Oh, Deanna! You know better than to trust anything that gossipy old man says."

"So you weren't at Beynar's Walk?"

"We were," Tom said. "But only because it's the only place to get decent pizza on this entire planet."

Deanna took a deep breath and let it out slowly through pursed lips. "He said you kissed."

"I kissed him, on the _forehead_ , because he was crying. I was comforting him." Tom looked away, and Lwaxana reached up and patted his arm. "Don't be embarrassed, dear. After everything you've been through, you should feel free to cry as much as you want."

Deanna looked like she wanted to collapse with relief. "Okay. That's...that's okay. That's good."

"What's wrong, dear? Don't you like the idea of your mother becoming involved with your former lover who also happens to be identical to your current husband?" Lwaxana raised her eyebrows. "Rather prudish of you if you ask me."

Deanna rubbed at her forehead. "No, I don't think that's prudish at all of me." She looked at Tom. "I wish you'd told me you were alive. I thought of you often."

Tom blinked. "Did you? Even though you're back with--" He jerked his chin at Will. "Him."

Deanna softened in a way that Will wasn't entirely comfortable with. Deanna must of sensed it, because she took his hand under the desk. "Yes. I may have married Will, but that doesn't mean I don't still care about you."

Lwaxana turned to look at him. "I told you she would want to know!" She turned back. "I tried to get him to comm you, but he refused."

Will said, "Well this is nice and all, but why is Thomas Riker in your house? Why are you getting pizza together in the first place?"

Lwaxana and Tom looked at each other. "Might as well tell them, dear."

Tom sighed. "Easier to show them." He leaned a little out of the frame and called, "Orla would you come in here please?"

A moment later a girl, Human by the looks of her, with freckled light brown skin and tightly curled red hair, come into the room. She appeared to be about ten or eleven.

"This is Orla. My daughter."

Will did the math and it didn't work. "Foster daughter," Tom amended before he could ask. "For now. We're working toward a legal adoption."

Orla stared at them, her face devoid of any emotion. Lwaxana reached over and gave her a quick hug. "Yes, my dear, it is confusing, even for the adults. No, he's not a twin, he's a transporter duplicate. _Very_ convoluted, I agree."

Orla turned and tugged at the cuff of Tom's robe. He knelt down and put his hand on her shoulder. He was missing the top half of the middle finger on his left hand, and when his sleeve fell back to his elbow, Will could see that there were scars on his hands and his forearms. Will had noted earlier that of his front teeth was an unnatural shade of white, suggesting that it was a replacement for a lost tooth. The Cardassian labor camp on Lazon Two had not been kind to him. Orla leaned forward and whispered in his ear. He nodded. "Yes, you can go now," he said, and she was off like a shot.

Will rubbed at his eyes. "This still doesn't answer my question."

"I found Orla in an abandoned research station on an L-class moon near the Badlands. The Dominion attacked them at the start of the war, before they'd been able to evacuate. Her parents had been killed, and she'd been left behind in the haste to evacuate. The people in charge claim they assumed she was dead. She survived on her own for almost three years. I--" He laughed bitterly. "I could relate."

Will noted that he didn't say what he was doing hanging around the Badlands, or even how he had gotten off of Lazon Two in the first place. Starfleet had gone after the war, and found nothing there except abandoned buildings and sun-bleached bones. Will had known that none of the bones they'd found had belonged to Tom, but that hadn't told him anything about whether the man was alive or dead.

"Orla is a telepath," Lwaxana added.

"She isn't Human?" Will asked.

"She is," Tom said. "One hundred percent, with no evidence of genetic tampering." Will could feel Deanna's surprise and her professional curiosity pique. Telepathic Humans were very very rare, something like one in two hundred million. Will was surprised she hadn't been sent to Vulcan or Betazed as a toddler. Most Human telepaths fared badly unless they were given intensive intervention from an early age. Tom seemed to know what he was thinking, because he added, "She didn't show any evidence of telepathy before the attack. Something about the trauma and the isolation triggered the ability. They tell me it happens like that sometimes. After all that time alone, she was having trouble adjusting to being around people and their thoughts. I didn't know how to help her, so I contacted Lwaxana for guidance."

"And I, once I recovered from learning that my son-in-law has a brother no one bothered to tell me about, insisted that they come to me. I've been helping Orla learn to handle her telepathy. We've made wonderful progress."

"Lwaxana is also helping me with the adoption. She doesn't have any family and she's made it clear that she wants to stay with me, but social services is reluctant to let me keep her. Something about being a criminal. Turns out the sympathy extended to the Maquis extends only so far as not throwing us in prison. We're still suspect."

 _What did you expect?_ Will thought, but he kept his mouth shut. Now was not the time to have that argument. He wanted to have it, someday. He wanted to look Tom in the eye and ask him what he thought he'd been doing stealing a starship. He wanted to ask him if he had spared a single thought to what it would do to Will when Starfleet found out that Tom was Maquis, if he cared at all that Will had found himself suddenly suspect because of Tom's actions. He already knew that answer to the latter question was no, but Will wanted to hear him say it all the same.

"You should see them together," Lwaxana said, fortunately much too far away to know what Will was thinking. "Orla absolutely adores Tom, and he's so good with her." Lwaxana gave Deanna a suggestive look. "I'm sure Will would make an excellent father also."

"Not going to happen," Deanna said, firmly.

Lwaxana deflated. 

"Is there anything we can do to help?" Deanna asked, and Will side-eyed her. He didn't want to involve himself in any of this.

"Oh, no, dear. I've got the matter well in hand. Anyone who wants to separate Tom and Orla is going to have to go through me first." She smiled, a dangerous smile, and Will sat up a little straighter. It was easy to forgot that Lwaxana Troi was far more formidable than most people realized. "Satisfied now that nothing scandalous is happening?"

Deanna went pink across the cheeks. "Yes. Thank you."

"Goodbye, Lwaxana. Tom, I'm...glad you aren't dead," Will said. Deanna gave a more charitable goodbye, and he cut the connection.

They sat in silence for several seconds after the comm closed. Finally, Deanna started laughing and buried her face in her hands. "I don't think I've ever been so relieved in my life."

"It would have been a very awkward family dinner," Will said, which just made Deanna laugh harder. Will shook his head. He was going to need some time to process things like Tom being alive, Tom living with Lwaxana, Tom having a child, and just Tom existing in his orbit again, but the important thing was that he wasn't romantically involved with Lwaxana, which meant Will could focus again. "Deanna, my love, I have work to do. So unless you have anything else to discuss..."

"Get out of your office?" Deanna filled in.

He kissed her. "Yes."

*

Lwaxana wasn't surprised when Deanna contacted her a few hours later. She was idly changing the color of her nails while half-listening to the local news. Closing the news channel with one finger, she answered Deanna with a simple, "Hello, Little One."

"Hello, Mother. You might have told me that Tom was living with you."

"You might have told me that he existed," Lwaxana countered.

Deanna sighed. "I never thought it would come up. I assumed...after he joined the Maquis and ended up on Lazon Two, I thought we'd never see him again."

"Hmm."

"It's a painful topic for me, mother. Will doesn't let himself think about the fact that he and Tom were a single person up until Nervala. He thinks of Tom as something entirely separate from himself, another person who came into being at that moment and just happens to have his same memories. I don't know, maybe he has to think that way to protect his own sense of self, but Mother, I know in my bones that Tom Riker is my _imzadi_ every bit as much as Will Riker is."

Lwaxana softened. "Some things are excruciating to talk about, aren't they?" She made herself picture Kestra's sweet face even though it hurt. It was the least she could do for having forgotten her all those years. Deanna could spin on about trauma and the mind protecting itself all she wanted, but really, what sort of mother forgot about her own child?

She forced her mind back to Deanna, who was saying, "I love Will. I love Tom. It's a different sort of love, but it's still love." She tapped the spot behind her ear the way she had always done when she was anxious and upset. "Mother, is he happy?"

Lwaxana looked out of the window, down to where Tom was in the garden with Orla. She had a book open, and was reading to him. Orla spoke aloud only to Tom, and not often even to him, but reading to him would briefly bring her out of her shell. He was stretched out on the grass, feet bare and hands behind his head. He had his eyes closed and the sun on his face.

"Yes, Little One. In fact, right this moment, he's very happy."

end


End file.
